"In Here and There, Owens presents a body of paintings that move between interior spaces and remembered landscapes. Bedrooms, windows, empty rooms, distant fields, and nocturnal scenes appear not as fixed locations but as emotional registers, places filtered through memory. The works feel intimate and provisional, as though at the edge of recollection. Figures, when they appear, are softened and indistinct, yet spaces seem inhabited even when empty. Light pools, fades, or flickers, creating a sense of ongoing narrative.

Owens’s paintings are shaped by the tension between domestic interiority and the desire for escape. The interiors reflect an effort to romanticize everyday life - to find comfort, meaning, and beauty within familiar rooms - while the landscapes emerge from travel, friendship, and shared experience beyond the self. Rather than presenting these as oppositional states, the work treats them as parallel expressions of the same impulse: a need to attend closely to moments of connection, whether outward-facing or inwardly absorbed. The exhibition’s title gestures toward this balancing act, capturing the difficulty of remaining present while continually imagining an elsewhere.

The artist works in egg tempera, a historically significant medium known for its labor-intensive process and matte, luminous surface. Owens paints from memory rather than direct observation, allowing time to soften edges and compress experience. The slow accumulation of fine brushstrokes produces surfaces that feel simultaneously fragile and enduring, marked by subtle shifts in color and density. This deliberate pace reinforces the emotional tenor of the work: quiet, reflective.

Landscapes appear less as destinations than as mental spaces, repositories for longing, friendship, and the desire for shared meaning, while interiors become sites of inward attention, where the familiar is repeatedly reexamined. Throughout Here and There, Owens returns to the difficulty of feeling content within one’s own life. The paintings do not resolve this tension; instead, they dwell within it. Domestic spaces and distant places are rendered with equal care, forming a quiet meditation on presence, memory, and the ongoing effort to inhabit one’s life as it unfolds." - from my 2026 show at Megan Mulrooney Gallery in LA.

the stars were inside this morning, is a collection of paintings that I exhibited in art fairs through 2025. Similarly to "here and there", the works are inspired by my domestic life and the small everyday adventures I take to escape that domesticity. 

sleeping with the window open, is a collection of paintings that I exhibited in art fairs throughout 2024 and 2025. The works are predominately inspired by moments experienced while traveling or while escaping my everyday life.  The works are a glimpse into the quiet moments in my life that have taken on deeper meaning over time.  They are typically painted from memory and celebrate the friendships, connections, and places that I love.

"morning to midnight consists of intimately-scaled egg tempera paintings that depict and revel in life’s transitory moments. A contemplative stillness emanates from each vignette as Owens allows the warmth of the sun and the glow of the moon to envelop each scene in a unifying light.

Owens’ work is resolutely contemporary, yet connected to the rich history of intimism found in the work of artists such as Matisse and Bonnard. The artist paints moments from his own life and childhood in a way that feels familiar and comforting. Using egg tempera, Owens is able to quickly and playfully add or redact elements as he attempts to translate his memories and capture the intimacy of these fleeting experiences. In boy sleeping on the heating vent/remembering the old farmhouse, the artist is seen as a young child lying on a landing at the top of the stairs; he’s underneath the bookshelf where he and his brothers would often fall asleep while paging through a book. The farmhouse was old and has since fallen into disrepair, but Owens grew up dreaming about how he might restore it one day. The light from the stairwell casts a narrow beam down the hall and a clock ticks on top of the bookshelf…Owen’s parents are just in the other room.

view from my childhood window depicts a landscape bathed in the muted, blue light that comes after nightfall. Owens remembers looking at the backyard from his upstairs window and being enthralled by how the familiar space took on a new and mysterious character at night. The sky is made up of thousands of organized linear marks, incorporating elements of drawing while speaking to the energy of a calm, dark evening. In breakfast with bo, short, intentional strokes of opaque yellows envelop the darker shades beneath as light comes through the window. This recent memory is not as narrative as it is experiential– nothing is extravagant or unnatural, it is simple and earnestly poetic.

Owens uses pre-ground natural earth pigments in his egg tempera and prepares his wood panels with chalk gesso, only using natural materials, perhaps as a nod to his professional work as a farmer, gardener, and landscaper over seven years. morning to midnight marks Owen’s return to art-making and, in its totality, is an ode to the under-appreciated moments that make up all of our lives. Whether he depicts a lazy morning in a sun-drenched room, or is taking a moment to step away at a summertime gathering, each work serves as a quiet recognition that beauty exists in the everyday." - from the press release from my 2024 show at Steven Zevitas Gallery, Boston, MA